The Dirty Secrets of Japan’s Illegal Ivory Trade

The Dirty Secrets of Japan’s Illegal Ivory Trade

September 28, 2016

EIA's report, The Dirty Secrets of Japan's Illegal Ivory Trade, reveals a 20-year history of broken commitments by Japan to enact effective controls to prevent poached tusks from being sold domestically or for illegal export. The report follows shocking new elephant census data revealing a 30% decline from 2007 to 2014 in populations in 15 of 18 African nations surveyed. This amounts to an unsustainable 8% annual decline, which threatens the species’ long term survival.

The report reveals:

• The identities of four Japanese ivory companies that admitted to undercover EIA investigators to conducting daily ivory sales to Chinese buyers and boasted of the vast amounts of ivory being illegally exported to China and Hong Kong

• Thirty of 37 Japanese ivory traders contacted by an undercover investigator offered to engage in some form of illegal activity to buy, sell, or fraudulently register a tusk that did not qualify for registration

• That most of Japan’s ivory tusk imports dating from before the 1989 ban on international trade in elephant ivory were from poached elephants. As a result, the government’s tusk registration scheme is effectively a tool for granting amnesty to large quantities of pre-1989 poached ivory

• An influential report by the wildlife trade monitoring group, TRAFFIC, supporting Japan’s 1997 bid to reopen ivory trade found that Japan could not control ivory trade, but the conclusions were changed and supported Japan’s successful bid to reopen ivory trade

In 2018 the Environmental Investigation Agency continued to confront the greatest environmental threats facing the world today. The EIA team pursued, documented and exposed the activities of syndicates that threaten endangered species, damage the climate and ozone layer, and drive the trade in timber stolen from the world’s most important remaining forests.

A new report by EIA, Authorized Plunder, documents the sale of 180,000 rosewood logs in Guinea-Bissau, enabled by the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), is fueled by high-level corruption, encourages illegal logging, and threatens local communities.